Harvard releases its DIY soft robotics toolkit

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Harvard, arguably the most famous Ivy League university on Earth, has a long history of democratization of education; together with MIT and several other elite institutions, they’ve pushed hard to make online learning easy and high in quality. However, one aspect of learning that’s intrinsically difficult to export from the physical school is the physical lab experiment; universities often invest tens or hundreds of thousands in equipment that makes it possible to apply many of the engineering principles explained in digital textbooks. Today, new technologies and a thriving and energetic DIY fanbase mean that even robotics can be farmed out to the cloud, and Harvard recently released its Soft Robotics Toolkit to help with education and entrepreneurship at every level of society.

Soft robotics is exactly what it sounds like, and since materials like rubber and plastic tend to be easier to fabricate and work with than metals, it has always tended to be one of the more approachable branches of robotics. However, with the advent of cheap modeling software, 3D printing, and open source control hardware, this guide makes it far easier than ever before. Soft robots are also well suited to open design models because they require fewer specialized parts; being soft, they can usually be molded to take the same actuators, valves, etc. and thus require fewer parts to be bought or kept on hand. Open design like this, which looks to democratize the base-level tools of invention, could be this decade’s version of last decade’s success with open source.

The guide includes step-by-step tutorials, a library of CAD files for molds of common robot parts, and a linked buyers’ guide so you don’t have to go bargain hunting for every little component. Sensors are generally fairly simple; since soft robots are often designed to come into physical contact with things, cheap and easy pressure sensors make up a good portion of the input hardware. With this guide in hand, the only thing standing between you and a soft robot driven by air-pressure actuators is a bit of patience and the price of materials.

Another Harvard team made this soft grasper using the same sorts of tools shown in the guide.

On the control end, Harvard’s guide helps you build a specialized, open source control board that looks a bit like the old board game Mouse Trap. A pump provides the fluid pressure to power the actuators that drive most soft robots, making the control process more like plumbing than electrical engineering. Working with things like fluidic pressure. Its bulky appearance, though, belies how approachable this whole project really is, and its commitment to making the basics of robot design available to virtually anybody.

This all comes together to allow extreme variety in design, from fully automated walking robots to medical prosthetics that work comfortably with the body, to small soft components within larger mechanical devices. It is the premier field looking into biomimetics (copying and applying the design innovations created by evolution), as biological systems are, for the most part, soft themselves. Soft robotics has enormous potential as a “disruptive technology” in the coming decades, especially when coupled with 3D printing; more and more functionality is coming within reach of the average enthusiast, and Harvard is investing now to make sure that trend continues.